Greater Greater Washington has been writing about and advocating for development issues in this region for nearly a decade. Many of us have taken what we talk about on the blog into our neighborhoods, some have even run for local office to keep pushing for these ideas.

After going to this year’s YIMBY conference in Oakland, CA, we realized that we could be doing an even better job of coordinating and organizing our community’s efforts when it comes to engaging in neighborhood-level development and transit decisions. So many YIMBY groups that came to this year’s conference started as just a group of disenchanted, urbanist-minded neighbors who were tired of parochial, even exclusionary voices always winning the day at the local zoning hearing.

So they got together, and they organized to make their voices heard.

What would that look like here in our neighborhoods? Every month, there are dozens of decisions being made about how neighborhoods will or won’t adapt to the change our region is experiencing. We’d like to help organize more readers and supporters of this blog to show up for these issues.

So what will GGWash YIMBY about?

GGWash has already created a powerful digital space to discuss and organize for a greater Washington region. We want to more intentionally translate our online power, offline, helping people get involved in decisions that shape their neighborhoods. Although this organizing effort will take place in real life, we’ll cover the issues these groups take on, amplifying their work on the blog.

This effort will look different in different neighborhoods, but here are some basics:

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David Whitehead is the Housing Program Organizer at Greater Greater Washington. A former high school math teacher and a community organizer, David works to broaden and deepen Greater Greater Washington’s efforts to make the region more livable and inclusive through education, advocacy and organizing. He lives in Edgewood.